Who We Are

Civil Politics is a non-profit organization that is run by a group of academics whose expertise lies in the use of data to understand moral psychology. We regularly publish articles in scientific journals concerning the antecedents and consequences of specific moral views. You can read some of our publications here, here, and here. An article about our organization is available here. Donations can be made here.

Our mission is to serve groups and individuals who are trying to bridge moral divisions by connecting them with scientific research in this domain. We do this in three primary ways:

1) Education on scientific research for non-academics – We regularly review new scholarly articles that relate to bridging moral divisions and also attempt to distill this research into concrete recommendations that have the most support (e.g. these two recommendations). We are also happy to consult with organizations or individuals (free of charge and no group is too large or too small) to tailor our recommendations to any particular situation.

2) Learning from partner organizations – There are many organizations doing valuable work bringing people together in their community and we seek to learn from their experiences. We routinely interview organizations as to their best practices and share their wisdom with others. We also help with programevaluations and the combined qualitative and quantitative evidence from field work serves to also inform our understanding of the research as our best recommendations are supported both by academic studies and field experience.

3) Supporting new research – We continue to publish academic articles and collect data that is used by others to understand morality better, with an eye toward work that can specifically help bridge moral divisions. Our data collection platform, YourMorals.org, collects data from hundreds of thousands of people each year, educating the public while also providing data for numerous moral psychology studies.

Our hope in providing this platform is to create a loop between researchers and practitioners, which will enable the evolution of effective, evidence based approaches to improving relations across divisions that have a moral dimension. While we do not bring people together ourselves, we are hopeful that our work can help some number of interested people and organizations bring people together more effectively. If you are interested in any of the above services or in contributing your knowledge/experience to others, please do contact us. A recent summary of what we do is available here.

Directors: Civil Politics is specifically run by Executive Director Matt Motyl at the University of Illinois. Ravi Iyer and Jonathan Haidt at NYU-Stern are directors who also co-founded the organization along with Matt.

Board of Advisors: Our board of advisors includes Liz Joyner, the Executive Director of The Village Square (a group working to improve political climates in Florida, Utah, and California) and Pete Ditto, a Professor at the University of California-Irvine. We are also a member of The Bridge Alliance.

About Us

Our goal is to educate the public about social science research on improving inter-group relations across moral divides.